#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Because I am walking, this morning, in a home away from home landscape, I am thinking about consciousness – what is vivid and clear, what is veiled and obscured. About how both the vivid and the veiled collaborate for psychic development.
“There is a strong physical aspect to having a dream of the dark man...We could say the dream-maker has dispensed with subtle messages to the dreamer and now sends images which shake the neurological and autonomic nervous system of the dreamer, thereby communicating the urgency of the matter...”
My Florida years were happy and haunted. Dreams figured powerfully in my years of sleeping and waking on the Gulf Coast. Partly, because I was a psychotherapist and attuned to client's dreams. Partly because I was living in a landscape so alien to my childhood in New England. Establishing a home and family in a southern, tropical climate offered me vast psychic distance and contrast.
“The dream is a harbinger; the dreamer has just discovered or is about to discover and begin liberating a forgotten and captive function of the psyche...”
Within the first weeks of my newly married Florida life, pregnant with my son, I had my first of many anxiety dreams while dozing off to sleep, curled safe and satisfied beside my sleeping husband: the felt presence of an unseen and unwelcome intruder approaching my bed.
The vivid: my body, sweating, hyper-alert, short of breath, a palpable presence of threat
The veiled: who and what is the threat, and why?
“The dark man appears in dreams when an initiation — a psychic change from one level of knowing and behavior to another more energetic level of knowledge and action is imminent. The initiation creates an archway that one prepares to pass through to a new manner of knowing and being...”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, poet, psychoanalyst, storyteller, offers illuminating analysis and clues to a woman's psychic journey throughout her lifetime.
It would be a couple of years before I would discover her work through Women Who Run With the Wolves. When I did, her cues to a woman's psychic journey nurtured mine with her vital and dynamic respect for the vivid and veiled in female imagination.
All photos and text copyright Kelly DuMar unless otherwise attributed.